How a CIO and a CPO can be happy together with their Master Data Governance!
As a CIO, your primary focus is on creating an efficient, streamlined IT infrastructure that supports the overall goals of the organization. When it comes to managing master data, multi-domain solutions promise several advantages, such as:
- Architectural simplicity: A single platform for managing multiple types of master data, such as customer, product, and supplier information connecting multiple ERPs.
- Scalability: easy management of large volumes of data.
- Cost-effectiveness: A single platform is expecting to be more cost-effective than a best-of-breed approach in terms of licensing, maintenance, and training.
On the other hand, as a CPO, your primary focus is on ensuring that the materials used in your organization are easy to find at shopfloor by your internal clients and efficiently and effectively procured and managed at inventory level. A best-of-breed solution can offer several advantages, such as:
- Built-in domain knowledge: Best-of-breed solutions are designed specifically for a particular type of master data. In this case, material master data, this means providing deeper functionality and more accurate data management relying on specific knowledge that must be built from scratch in a multi-domain solution.
- Flexibility: Best-of-breed solutions can be more flexible and customizable, allowing you to tailor the solution to your specific needs.
- Improved governance: A best-of-breed solution with a customized AI engine can help you to govern better and manage your material master data, ensuring compliance with quality standards, cleansing existing duplicates, avoid the creation of new ones.
So, Multi-domain solutions and best-of-breed solutions have their pros and cons, but as a CPO, if your primary concern is governing material master data, a best-of-breed solution is likely the right choice for you, and to support this decision, there are some additional things to take in consideration:
- Complexity: Material master data can be complex and involve a large amount of technical specifications that differs category by category.
- Inconsistency: Data inconsistency can arise when material master data is managed in multiple systems, leading to errors, missing technical information and duplicates.
- Regulations: The materials used in many industries are subject to strict regulations, and failure to comply with these regulations can result in significant consequences.
In this context, a best-of-breed solution empowered by AI technologies, such as machine learning and natural language processing, can help to identify patterns and inconsistencies in data, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring new data consistency. In other words, automate and streamline the management of material master data, which is not natively available in a multi-domain solution.
Then, how can one combine the advantages of a multi-domain solution with a best-of-breed? Is integrating the best-of-breed into a multi-domain platform and exploiting both strengths possible?
APIs allow different systems to communicate with each other and exchange data. By integrating a best-of-breed solution for material master data management with a multi-domain solution through APIs, you can ensure that CIOs and CPOs can be happy together with their Master Data Governance!